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25 Kilo Tyre Hammer demo.

"Tyre Hammer" Not a phrase which brings to mind a well tuned professional machine, but having looked at a few home built Power hammer designs, its to my mind the best of them. For those who don't know the tyre hammer is pretty much based on a little giant type, spring/ pivots/counterweight action. Using a tyre for traction of the motor and to support the counterweight. If you search "tyre hammer" you will find many examples showing the mechanism. Plans for making a hammer have been made by Clay Spencer. If I was hammerless, this would be the way I would go as it makes a nice size hammer for blade smithing and light damascus production. Far more versatile than a press in my opinion, (although a press is always handy too) And taking up an amazingly small footprint, less than 1m floor space. Needs to be bolted down though or it would wobble all over the shop.

Anyway I was very interested when my friend and fellow blacksmith told me he had built one so I went to have a play. He has done a few things differently as everything had to be reworked for what was available to him, many parts were specially machined. He also felt the Spencer design was a bit fixed as far as the gap between the dies so he added the ability for the head to move up and down to adjust for different tooling. The results impressed me and he has ended up with a very well set up versatile machine.
Here is a vid of me having a play on it, seeing how "heavy" and "delicate" it could be.
Ignore the silly banner, its just from the conversion software, I was too mean to upgrade the demo.

I could see one of these in my workshop eventually set up for specific tasks alongside my 40 kilo Anyang.

Yeah, he did a nice job of building it. There is hardly any side play in the head, it runs on teflon guides. He has made me want another hammer though, even though I don't NEED one. I would like to try this hammer with a large die on the bottom and a smaller die on the top, both very slightly convex, so you can forge the tang without any additional tooling and very carefully control the movement of the steel as the blade and taper are formed. Like the Japanese hammers.

Yeah, nice to be able to do all the shaping in one tool. Another advantage to these in their basic construction is its really easy to make dies quickly and cheaply as you just weld them to a plate which is fixed with bolts, no dovetails to machine. Mind you I expect the threads take some abuse and wear after a while, but easily repaired.